SF Int'l Film Festival - Awards & Tributes

Adam Curtis

Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award

The Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award honors the lifetime achievement of a filmmaker whose work is crafting documentaries, short films, animation or work for television.

Secret Histories

by David Thomson

In Britain, where documentary is still a basic form of television programming, the names of producers are sometimes taken for granted. That condition ended for Adam Curtis when BBC2 began to play his three-part series, The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear, in October 2004. This was far from the personal polemics of Michael Moore.

Indeed, the subtlety of the series was that, despite its brave and provocative message, The Power of Nightmares had a wonderful institutional calm and order. And if it did seem as if the BBC itself was saying these things, then that grand entity had to move quickly to ascertain that the point of view belonged to Adam Curtis. But, of course, the entire Curtis career has been based on the notion that a documentary can be so thoroughly researched and so deeply thought out that the result carries a natural authority, and a quiet but forceful undermining of all the contrived hysteria and paranoia that can sustain false nightmares, the spinning of dread and the misleading of the public.

This may seem a parochial issue, part of the politicking that goes on over the duties and the destiny of the BBC, or a thing called public broadcasting. But in giving Adam Curtis its Persistence of Vision award, the San Francisco International Film Festival is recognizing not just the work of ten years from Curtis, but the honorable role of national criticism in a medium of broadcasting that has been created and supported for exactly that reason: to challenge the status quo.

Curtis is very far from the egotistical director and spokesman established by Michael Moore. After all, he is chiefly the producer of his series, or their editor, in the sense of being the editor of a large and important newspaper. Curtis does not advance a personal style so much as a standard of journalism that is rigorous, informed and arresting. He assumes the intelligence and concern of a viewing public, and he then proceeds with his argument. The films assemble many fragments and many talking heads, but their message is carried in the old-fashioned form of an educational narrative that is often scathing and sardonic. For the passion behind Curtis’s work is quite simply his anger and amazement that in our time it is still so easy and so common to hoodwink the public.

For 15 years, Adam Curtis has concentrated on a cultural history behind the politics of the 20th century and beyond. In 1992, he made Pandora’s Box, six “fables” on the consequences (often dangerous) of political and technocratic rationality, especially when used to crush common sense and a clear reporting of the facts. Nothing concerns Curtis more than the way public relations and spin doctoring have become ways of masking the true nature of modern history—and nothing is so vital to the new forms of modern bureaucratic totalitarianism, the dulcet “order” that has come to fill the ground left by fascism and communism. In other words, the “enlightened” problem solving favored in the most advanced countries, but employed to obfuscate democratic impulses.

In 2000, Curtis delivered The Mayfair Set, a fascinating history of the ways in which big business gradually took over British politics in the years after World War II. This series had elements of commercial scandal, but its true target was business-thinking as a threat to liberties. That message was greatly sharpened in The Century of the Self (SFIFF 2003), four films on the way Freudian ideas on the working of the mind have guided public relations, advertising and the promotion of political ideologies.

There were other films along the way, including a magnificent study of how the ambitious broker, Nick Leeson, destroyed the house of Barings, and Modern Times: The Way of All Flesh (which won Best Science and Nature Documentary in the 1998 SFIFF), but Curtis was waiting for a world crisis that would gather together all the conspiracies he had identified. That came with 9/11 (a formula since used to eliminate argument, discourse and thinking) and the thorough way in which terror has been employed to distort our vision of international affairs.

Ironically, The Power of Nightmares has yet to be shown in the United States, the country in most urgent need of its bracing intelligence. That is because, traditionally, the BBC does not often aim its shows at an international audience and saves money by not clearing world rights on all its clips and music. It is also because no American broadcasting enterprise feels brave enough for it. That is a very Curtisian dilemma: the cultural structure limiting the message. But The Power of Nightmares has already won notable supporters in this country, and this Festival is dedicated to drawing attention to the series and to the merits of Adam Curtis’s approach. It is hard to think of a more relevant and striking picture in this or any other festival.

David Thomson’s newest book, The Whole Equation, was recently published. A new edition of The Biographical Dictionary of Film, first published in 1975, is now available. He lives in San Francisco with his family.